Page:Poor Law Administration, its Chief Principles and their Results in England and Ireland as Compared with Scotland.djvu/6

496 the occupancy of the land, which should be facilitated and promoted in various ways, one of which is the assurance given to the cottier that he need not cling to the wretched mud hovel, for his children as well as himself, for that neither he nor they are now in any danger of perishing upon abandoning it, even if he fail to obtain a more productive occupancy. Under the Poor-law Amendment Act, extensive sales were made of cottages and plots of land, amounting, I believe, to a million or more in saleable value, which had fallen into the possession of the parishes, on account of the destitution of the cottier owners, but in a large proportion of cases, I believe, on their abandonment of them and the abandonment of the neighbourhoods for a higher return for labour to be obtained as wages elsewhere. The whole proceeding in this class of cases was one of benefit, in the greater return of produce to be obtained by their employment at the market rates of wages, as well as from the gain of produce to the country by superior or less expensive culture. Mr., now Sir George Nicholls, whose opinions were thought to be less extreme or more impartial than mine, was sent over to Ireland to examine and report on the measures of the nature of a legal provision which it was expedient to adopt. Upon a full and impartial examination, he reported decidedly in favour of a legal right being given to the able-bodied, and to a system of relief being instituted, in which entire and not partial relief should be given, and that relief in the workhouse should be the rule. By his exertions mainly, improved poorhouses have been constructed, and Ireland has had the advantage of an advanced system of relief, for which union chargeability in wide areas is substituted for the English law of relief under the law of parochial settlement.

Of Out-door Belief System in Scotland. In relation to Scotland, we were not consulted, and an opposite system, founded apparently on the population theory, was adopted, under which the adult able-bodied persons, as such, have no right to relief whatsoever, and under which only one-fifth of the parishes are provided with poorhouses of any sort, and in which partial relief, or out-door relief, instead of being the rule, is the exception.

Defects of Poor Law Administration in England. The opposite systems of relief have been in operation in Ireland and in England sufficiently long to enable a comparison to be made of the results which I now write; but, before I present the statistical results, I wish to submit some prefatory statements, chiefly bearing on the intermediate position occupied by the present Poor-law administration in England. Those only who have had experience of it can be aware how difficult it is, in the present state of political